


make and made

by clytemnestras



Series: never is an awfully long time [2]
Category: Community (TV)
Genre: F/M, Light Dom/sub, Minor Annie Edison/Britta Perry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 18:35:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20493368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: I don't know why I'm still afraid, if you weren't real I'd make you up





	make and made

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nereid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nereid/gifts).

> for the [ficathon!](https://clockwork-hart1.dreamwidth.org/52548.html)
> 
> this ended up as a loose sequel to _that shadow dances over lips and bedroom walls_ by accident. oops? basically the bastards decided to fall into the same dynamics, but it's not necessary to read that one first (but you should bc it's one of my favourite things I've ever written)

It's not much of a secret that he likes to watch. Not illicitly, not to mean anything other than what it means, just as this kind of personalised anthropology, to study what people say they are, as much as what they become. So he watches her a lot, because she's close, and because she's a good study, complex in the right ways, a balance between youthful and mature, straight-laced and fancy free. But mostly he watches her because she lets him.

It's not simply back-and-forth, one indulging the other as leverage for the next tug of unconventional desire. She asks him things softly, in the kitchen or in the bathroom as they're both brushing their teeth (it's a delightfully _Bring It On_ moment, one that's precious enough to restage over and over, as he rushes into the bathroom when he hears the click of her door just to smile at her in the streaked mirror, less play-acting and more an inspiration point - he's not sure at what point they fell from the imitation to the art.) Her voice will catch, and eyes downcast as she tugs on the corner of his blue t-shirt, the colour of her hand an interesting contrast, but if he staged it again he'd rather be wearing red, purple maybe.

"Abed," she says, "I want. I don't know. Make me someone good."

And so his mouth tilts sideways in seamless smirk, and he slips into 1940s pulp imitation voice and says, "You're not just good, Doll, you're the best I ever saw."

She preens for that, for the epithet, against her better judgement and serious feminist credentials. See, that's the thing. She contradicts, and he wants to unfurl her.

She spits into the sink and spins her toothbrush around her fingers, points it at him like a discreet pistol. "You're damn right I am, bub."

*

Some days he's a boy and some days he's a camera and some days he's what Shirley would call _treading too close to blasphemy, boy._

(Some days she's a girl, something bold and fully formed and some days she's malleable as clay but mostly she belongs to something between the two, utterly what she is at the same time as being something compellingly different. It's hard to capture in words - Annie Edison best belongs to the audio-visual medium.)

This morning they're in pajamas, comfortable, familiar, almost passé but not quite straying there, because he could find uncharted wonders in the way the cotton creases and shifts along the lines of her abdomen or bunches up around her arms. Britta is passed out in her clothes, which adds some spice to the set piece; at once the stabilizer and the thing that sends them fluttering wildly toward unknown territory.

This morning they're in the kitchen, trying not to make too much noise, lest they brace for the enemy fire of hungover fury. Ducked under the kitchen counter, watching a batch of muffins slowly rise, his mother's recipe, Annie's military precision. Abed can cook, it's intuitive and second nature. Annie can bake - perform each step perfectly and you're rewarded with cake, like a test where you're given all the right answers. She has flour streaked softly across her face, charmingly klutzy and intentionally made, like a brief dash of snow across her cheeks. They are so mid-noughties romcom poster.

So maybe today they are two pairs of falling pajamas, a kitchen counter, a spilt bag of demerara sugar, and maybe Britta is the ghost that is haunting the home and maybe it's better when they go off script, hiding like mice in the cracks between normalcy. They tuck themselves into open spaces, his thigh in the gap between Annie's slightly splayed legs, his mouth in the place between either lip that quivers with shallow breaths. Her chest, the warmth of it, the perfect place to bury himself on a chilly autumn morning.

"Who are you?" She asks him, hand fisted in his flannel pajama shirt.

He says, "I'm here," which is not an answer, really, but enough of one to have her sigh and melt beneath him anyway. He carefully dusts the flour from the bridge of her nose, and the hand movement says, _I see you_, like taking off her fictional nerd girl glasses or shaking down her tied up hair.

The oven dings, fade to black.

*

He asks her on a soft morning, rolled together on the edge of her bed. Her hair fans out across the pillow, Medusa, or the haphazard rays of mid-morning sun. He's not surprised, but quietly charmed, her simply existing in accidentally cinematic aerial shot. He doesn't sleep here often - she craves her space, and he his, a novelty of rehab and dorm rooms and disapproving parents. But sometimes things fall this way, playing at domesticity until his character would feel best curled up beside hers, married or living in sin. Or she will look across at him in the din of the living room, spelling out words with her Disney eyes that he has deciphered to mean, _hey, can you hold me?_

It's transactional, his body heat for her confirmed affection. It's a half-life they're leading, fiction-nonfiction. She shifts and murmurs beside him.

It means something, probably, that he woke up with his arms around her and the instinct was to pull tighter together. TV would say it means unequivocally, He. Is. In. Love. The epiphany of post-coital comfort, the logic of how easily they have fallen into these paper cutouts of a couple, hand in hand, folded a thousand ways. He thinks if he thinks anymore his eyes will cross.

"Annie," he says, sitting half up, his arm unwinding to simply rest on the curve of her shoulder, warm from his chest being pressed against it. "We need to talk."

She makes a short sound and rolls further into herself. "It's too early for movie trope bingo, Abed. Go back to sleep."

"No," he says. "I mean it."

She gathers herself in the covers and rolls to face him, eyebrows lowered in concern and eyes squinting in sleepiness. "Are you alright?" Her hand reaches out to find his cheek, and she is warmth and warmth and warmth.

"I'm having. I don't know, a revelation or a crisis, it's hard to tell, and I just have this feeling if I don't just word vomit all of it right now I'll never be able to explain it all. I don't want this to be our third act breakup." He tilts his head, watches her eyes follow him. "You like telling me what to do."

"Abed -"

He wraps his hand around hers, giving a firm squeeze. "Please."

It wasn't a question, but she confirms anyway, a slow nod. "Yeah, yes, I do."

"And you like it when I make you into something. When I make you up."

She curls closer around him, a curving line of concern. "What's this about?"

He tucks some loose hair behind her ear, like Jeff would do, to ease and also stoke romantic tension, lets his hand rest on the curve of her jaw. "I wish I knew," he says, and she slaps his hand away.

"No. Tell me as Abed."

He's starting to entertain the possibility that she likes to watch him right back.

"I'm not sure yet," he tells her, finding her hand again. "I'll tell you when I know."

*

The Dreamatorium rolls out as a bronze desert, the sky indigo, the world ending rapidly before their eyes.

Britta is tipsy and teetering on her toes, peeking out above the cardboard boxes, and leaning heavily into Annie's side. Annie's expression is hard. Vengeful. Victorious.

"I think we lost them," she says with a slight sneer. She spits a toothpick from her mouth and lowers behind their cardboard box carriage. "Not for long, though."

"We're doomed," Britta mutters, clinging to Annie's vest, slightly pulling at the neckline of her already daring blouse. She swigs the tequila cradled in one hand, for authenticity and lubrication, she's more willing to indulge them like this, when they're all warm and golden.

"Maybe so," Abed whispers, sliding his back down so they're gathered close. "But the wind will carry our story forever."

"Screw your legend," Britta exclaims, fisting her hands in both of their shirts. "When I go out I don't want any regrets."

She smiles impishly and pulls Annie forward, lining their foreheads up. She leans up, and Annie meets Abed's gaze the moment their lips brush before succumbing to it.   
  
Annie can't help but sink into the kiss and into the character, cupping Britta's jaw in one hand. She keeps a firmness, a whisper of control even up against Britta's fluid softness. He watches her fingers twitch, nails carefully tucked as she leans back to inhale, and Britta slumps forward in the space between them, giggling brightly.

He catches Annie before her face can flicker with conflicted emotion or fall pensively toward the floor. Her finds the back of her head with both hands and cups it, looking up at her through his eyelashes.

"Well now you need a matched set," he says, and kisses her deeply. It's a roguish mirror to them years ago, clutching each other in a paintball warzone, except now she's pushing him, holding him, making him. In this story she is the hero and he the supporting player.

Britta applauds them, and so Abed bows for her, plays his part so she'll never know where the acting begins or ends. Behind his back his thumb rubs a slow circle on the back of Annie's hand.

Annie squeezes then pulls away, pointing over the imagined horizon. It has changed to brilliant red around them, the sun a burning orange ball in the sky, like the sky were the sea above, reflecting their campfire. "They're gaining!" She pulls out her gun (paintball, hand-held, her name in looping script on the butt, a parting gift from Troy), locks, and loads.

She takes the lead, and he lets her.

The world is saved.

*

"What do you want?" He asks, spread out beneath her on a pile of cushions and blankets, a pillow fort graveyard beneath his spine.

She inhales and shifts her hips a bit, so they're both pressed closer-than-close."Hmm…" she fiddles with the top button of his pajama shirt, then gently pulls it open. "This is meant to be for you. What do _you_ want?"

He lets her hands make him, mark him, spread out across the topography of his chest that she must know by now, but still, the crease between her eyebrows suggest new revelations, or perhaps a search for hidden treasure.

He frames her hips with his thumbs and presses down, because he knows it makes her sigh no matter if she's pirate or peasant or hospital administrator. "I want you to make me someone good." His fingers dip into her waistband. Pull away the elastic away, soothe the skin with the pads of his fingers.

She smiles and takes his hands, holds them above his head, wrists twined together. She moves back over him slowly, testing out her new character, her new skin, rolling curves and angles. "You're always good for me," she says, pinching the thin skin around his hip bones before sinking her own back down on top of him. "You're my booty." Her naked legs look so pale against the dark blue of his pajamas, her panties even paler. Every twitch of her hips and thighs look obscene and strangely hypnotic.

Her kisses become brief and sweet and torturous, and they swim from his mouth to his throat to the chest she has already sunk her nails into. Slipping, biting, she devours him, her eyes lustblown and dark as the ocean.

His hands wind around one another but do not move from where she placed them. He's opened out for her. Spread. Claimed. He chokes back a shout as she sinks her teeth and soothes it with her tongue, grinding into him like he is her private playground.

"You're good," she tells him, rocking hard into his hips and grinding there, building herself as she tears him down. Her eyebrows crease again, cheeks and chest softly blushed. "You're _very good_."

She sighs as she moves, scraping her fingernails across his skin, leaving white trails that disappear as quickly as they bloom, digging harder the faster she falls out of rhythm.

Her mouth on his chest, her hips against his, she rolls through him like a wave.

*

She wraps him up from behind in something fluffy and warm and closed up, a faux-fur bath robe that neither of them are sure who owns, but that has become the physical manifestation of their shared mania. She wore it last, a soft response to her C in Calligraphy 101 (_"Why did they have to make my failure look so beautiful?"_), and now it's his, wrapped around his bare shoulders as he grimaces into his computer screen.

She hands him a cool glass of special drink and lowers her hands onto his shoulders, too. He likes the weight of her, like an anchor. He has made such a bad habit of floating when people need him to be still.

"It's over," he tells her, looking up, hand still clicking refresh. "Cancelled. It's funny. Things I love have this weird habit of not sticking around."

He feels her hands tense on his shoulders, didn't mean -

But still, there's an _assumption_.

"Not everything is gonna go away, Abed." She pulls back his wheely chair and sinks delicately into his lap, arms lost to the tundra of white fur.

He wishes he had his camera. Her face is at this angle, the expression something like sad and something like yearning and something like, maybe, love, and he doesn't have that particular cocktail yet. Still, there are a thousand hours of this, of her eyes or the curve of her hand, her hair swishing in summer breeze. A catalog of a partial lifetime, all the parts of Annie but most especially when they have intersected with his.

So even _if_, even _when_ -

"No," he says wrapping the robe around them both. "I guess you're right."

*

He's dreaming, or isn't, eyes half-lidded, body warm and free as water, sinking and spreading out.

"Shh," says something. God, or the Blue Fairy, maybe.

She smoothes his hair, watches him in the dark.

"Go back to sleep."

She covers him, with a blanket, or a body, or the sky, sighs, eases against his body like sand.

He's dreaming, or isn't. He doesn't much mind.


End file.
